Isaiah 56:1-8
Hear God’s word, Isaiah 56, beginning
at verse one. Thus says the Lord, or Yahweh,
keep justice and do righteousness for soon my salvation will come
and my righteousness will be revealed. Blessed is the man
who does this and the son of man who holds it fast, who keeps
the Sabbath, not profaning it and keeps his hand from doing
any evil. Let not the foreigner who has
joined himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely separate
me from his people. And let not the eunuch say, behold,
I am a dry tree. For thus says the Lord to the
eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please
me and hold fast my covenant. I will give in my house and within
my walls a monument. and a name better than the sons
and daughters. I will give them an everlasting
name that shall not be cut off. And the foreigners who join themselves
to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord
and to be his servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does
not profane it and holds fast my covenant. These I will bring
to my holy mountain and make them joyful in the house of prayer.
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on
my altar for my house shall be called a house of prayer for
all peoples. Amen. Some of you will remember,
maybe you’ve bumped along in your Bible reading for the year
when King David wished to build a house for the Lord. Remember
he had built a palace of cedars and It was up on Mount Zion in
Jerusalem and it was a great grand palace. And David got to
thinking to himself, here I live in a house made of cedar and
the glory of God still dwells in a tent. The tabernacle was
still the temporary house of God. And so David had it in his
heart to build a house. for the Lord, a temple. But the
prophet told him, you’re not going to do it. You’ve got too
much blood on your hands. It will be for your son to do.
So Solomon built a house for the name of God. It was a grand,
huge, massive temple, nothing like it. And it would be where
the glory of God would dwell in the midst of his people. And
there’s that great day where Solomon dedicated the house of
the Lord, the temple of God. And one of the things he prayed
for as he dedicated the temple was that people from all kinds
of places, people of all nations, not just Israelites, not just
the seed of Abraham would come. they would pray to the Lord of
heaven and earth and that their prayers would be heard. Sometimes we think the inclusion
of the Gentiles, the inclusion of the nations is something New
Testament, something that comes along, um, only with the coming
of Jesus or Pentecost, something like that. But we remember, um,
Rahab, we remember Ruth, and there are a handful of others
who feared the Lord and desired to be united to the people of
God. And then you come to the New
Testament where Jesus makes his way into the temple and he sees
the money changers. He sees the merchants and he
sees all the trade going on. And he says, after cleansing
the temple, after, you know, turning over the tables of the
money changers and the storekeepers, he said, Uh, this, what does
he say? Something like the zeal for the
house of the Lord consumes me. He says, uh, the house of prayer
has been turned into a den of robbers. Uh, but Jesus also speaks
of the church, uh, the house of God, the temple of God being
a place where people from all sorts of nations will come and
worship. When I was a seminary student, I had about nine different
ways I could get from the Lake Norman area, north of Charlotte,
into south Charlotte. Whenever traffic did this or
that, and I had all these routes, and if I got on the highway and
this road was clogged, that road was clogged, I had it all worked
out. There was this one particular route where you drive through
a pretty rough part of town, But you would pass all of a sudden
after, you know, going through some sketchy areas, you would
pass this giant cathedral looking place. And it had an iron fence
and like, it wasn’t real gold, but it was kind of gold adornments.
And the sign on the church was a house of prayer. for all nations,
and I think it was a chain, maybe it said TM or something after
the name, I don’t know, but that was a pretty big enterprise,
and so at least some churches in some parts of the country
recognize all kinds of people gather in God’s name under his
banner. Well, what does that look like?
What does it look like, at least in this passage, for a person
to fear God and to be included among his people. Well, a couple
things, Sabbath keeping, heart allegiance, and heart obedience. And then we might say rinse and
repeat. So at least in this passage, and you’ll find this in other
places in the scripture, a person who is included in the people
of God, well, of course, we know they’re saved by the blood of
Jesus. That’s what gets you in. But the mark of a disciple, the
mark of a believer, the mark of one who pleases God is one
who keeps Sabbath, one who has heart allegiance to Yahweh, and
one who obeys from the heart. And of course, the Christian
life is one of faith, repentance, and obedience. It’s one of rinse
and repeat. It’s not that complicated. It
doesn’t have to be overly complicated, which we sometimes make it. But
you have in this passage outsiders, they’re foreigners. You have
in this passage, people who have a mutilated body, the eunuchs. Don’t think I need to explain
that to any of y’all. And all of this, we are reminded
when we read Acts chapter eight of Philip, the evangelist, who
bumps into the Ethiopian, who is leaving Jerusalem, going,
I suppose, back to Ethiopia, and he’s reading the book of
Isaiah in his chariot. And he inquires, can you explain
this passage? He explains it. It’s about Jesus.
I believe in Jesus. There’s some water. Why not baptize
me? And so there is the Ethiopian, there’s the foreigner part, and
there’s the eunuch. There’s the mutilated part. You
see, at some point in time, if you were a foreigner, and if
you were mutilated, or not both exclusively, but one or the other
or both, you could not come into the presence of God in the temple. It was something that was forbidden. And so our passage opens up the
way of salvation. Now, remember in Isaiah, we have
seen a couple things, two things, really. One’s a geographical
problem and one is a sin problem. And the geographical problem,
remember, is going to be solved by Cyrus, the king of Persia,
who is going to make a way for the exiled Jerusalemites, the
exiled Judahites, he’s going to make a way for them to get
from Babylon a thousand miles back to Jerusalem so they can
rebuild and restart life for God in the promised land in the
little bitty shadow of a way that will take place. And then
there’s the sin problem. And the suffering servant, the
servant of Yahweh, we’ve gone through the four servant songs.
He will take care of the sin problem. So in the last couple
of weeks, we’ve seen a lot about the suffering servant. We’ve
seen the sin problem become resolved. Now we’re going to see the application
of the sin problem solved to God’s people. A great way to
understand salvation. And I don’t know if it’s unique
to John Murray, the Westminster theologian, but he divided salvation
as redemption accomplished, all that Jesus did, and then redemption
applied. What Jesus did applied to the
believer by the word and spirit. So Jesus died on the cross, accomplished
a lot of things, but it doesn’t get applied to the believer until
the Holy Spirit and the word do their work of salvation in
the individual. So in a sense, you could have
redemption accomplished here by the suffering servant. Now it’s
redemption applied through faith in Yahweh. All right, let’s just
think through and pick through these verses with these thoughts
in mind. If you look at verses one and
two, thus says Yahweh, a couple of practices, keep justice, Due
righteousness. All right, you’ve got keep justice,
moral law, you’ve got due righteousness. So you personally need to do
the right things, have a good personal biblical ethic. For
soon my salvation will come and my righteousness will be revealed. Remember when the prediction of John the Baptist
was made. Luke, in his gospel account,
brings up Zechariah and Elizabeth. And, you know, Zechariah is the
old guy. He’s the priest. They don’t have any young’uns.
You know, and Elizabeth keeps the front porch with petunias
and keeps the porch swept. And, you know, when Elijah or
Zechariah is not off at the temple on his, you know, tour of duty,
as it were, you know, she’s keeping him fed and fried chicken and
all the rest. But it says of Zechariah and
Elizabeth, they were righteous. Kind of this first one here,
they kept justice, they did righteousness. Just a simple, quiet way of life. And so we’ve seen this exemplified
in places in the scripture. And verse two explains the blessing
of it. Blessed is the man who does this.
The other week, up in New York at Esther’s funeral, you know,
all their family there, a couple generations, you know, Daryl
had given me the, my marching orders. You make sure my family
hears the gospel. Okay. Um, you know, a lot of people
there cause they loved Esther and I made sure to say to the,
the couple generations sitting there, if you, if you want to,
uh, be like Esther, you’ve got to have faith in her savior because
Esther was like her savior. Right? And so if you, if you
want to live a righteous life, if you want to keep justice,
do righteousness and do this consistently and receive God’s
blessing, you need faith in Jesus, the inward change of the Holy
Spirit, and you need to work at it, not in a salvation way,
but it takes an orderly disciplined life to live the Christian life. It is not by accident that we
hold fast. the commandments. It is not by
accident that we keep Sabbath. It is not by passive involvement in the Christian
faith that we keep our hands from doing evil. Think of the
prologue to Job. And what did we find about Job
in that first verse or two, the first chapter or two of Job,
there was a steadfast man, a righteous man who loved God, kept his commandments. And he even wondered if his children
might have disobeyed. So he kept sacrifice for them
as well. Eugene Peterson, in his book
about the Psalms of Ascent, be a tad unrelated because that’s
about worship and going to Jerusalem. But the title is worth the price
of the book. He said it’s a long obedience
in the same direction. You know, we want something glamorous
and something, you know, that we can blog about or video about.
And we want the Christian life to be just something just, oh,
big and glorious. And a lot of times it’s just
rinse and repeat, faith, repentance and obedience. Rinse and repeat,
love God, keep his commandments. Rinse and repeat. Keep justice,
do righteousness. Keep the Sabbath, don’t profane
it. Keep God’s commandments and don’t profane the day or do anything
that is evil. Why are these marks? Why are
these marks by the Lord? Well, in particular, why about
the Sabbath? Well, the Sabbath is something
that encompasses everything that we have in God. You think about
the first instance of the Sabbath in creation. God made the world
and everything in it in the space of six days. He took what was
formless and void and he formed it and he filled it. And the
crown of his creation was man whom he put on the earth to work.
make it productive to keep or to guard. And he told him to
have dominion, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with
the glory of God. And so in creation, we have a
Sabbath ordinance. You work six days and you rest
a day, work six days and rest a day. Well, then when you get
to Exodus 20 and the 10 commandments, Israel has just come out of Egypt
where they worked, worked, worked, worked, worked. They had the
wicked taskmasters. in the Egyptians, and they had
to make bricks without straw, and their condition was pitiful,
so pitiful that they cried out to the Lord. He heard their distress.
He called Moses and Aaron and sent them to Pharaoh to say,
let my people go. And so when you come to Exodus
chapter 20, there’s the commandment to keep the Sabbath as well.
It’s in creation, God made you, and he made you to be a six-day
work and a one-day rest person. But then you come to Exodus chapter
20, and the oomph or whatever the motivation behind keeping
Sabbath is you were slaves. And now you get rest. And sort
of the idea that passes on to us as believers is we’re created
to work and rest, work and rest. And we do that every day because
we get to sleep at night, but we’re also supposed to build
that in every week. Six days we labor, but one day
we rest. But also we rest from our sin. We rest from our slavery to Pharaoh
or our slavery to Satan, which we have been liberated from in
the cross of Jesus Christ. But also there’s that future
glimpse. Heaven is a Sabbath rest. Heaven is an eternal rest.
And so while church should be an outpost of heaven or a precinct
of glory, Sunday ought to be a little glimpse of what heaven
will be like, where we in the eternal Sabbath will worship
God and rest from our labors. And so in this passage, One of
the, or three of the aspects, I suppose, of serving the Lord
are keeping Sabbath, keeping justice, doing righteousness,
not profaning the Sabbath and not letting our hands do evil. Uncommon day, heart allegiance
and heart obedience. And this is for the people of
Abraham. But this is also for the mutilated,
the eunuchs. And this is also for outsiders
and for foreigners. And so to desecrate the honor
of God by not keeping his commandments or to desecrate the day was displeasing
to him. All right. Verses three, four
and five give us Something specific about the foreigner and the eunuch,
the foreigner and the eunuch. Verse three says, let the foreigner
who has joined himself to the Lord say, the Lord will surely
separate me from his people. And then it says, let not the
eunuch say, behold, I am a dry tree.” Think about Abraham. Abraham was a foreigner. He was
from Ur of the Chaldeans. Abraham was an idolater. He worshiped
gods in Ur of the Chaldeans. And Abraham lived in a culture
that was just doggone pagan. And so what does God say to Abraham?
Go, leave your family, leave your culture, leave your gods,
and go into the land I’ll show you. Go into the promised land.
There call on my name. and I’ll make you a great nation
and there you can worship me.” And so we see Abraham go and
just little bitty Abraham, a small little congregation goes. He
builds an altar, he calls on the name of the Lord, he bounces
around a bit, does some You know, some goofy things here and there,
but ultimately he has faith in God. God blesses him. And here
we are. What does Galatians say? Those
who have faith in Jesus are indeed the offspring of Abraham. But
if you weren’t part of cultic Israel, if you weren’t within
the borders of Israel or within the camps of Israel, your society,
your culture, your gods, your worldview, was unacceptable. And so for a foreigner who joined
himself to Yahweh, probably had a little bit of trouble, probably
had a little bit of that pick and daisy mentality. He loves
me and he loves me not. And what does God say here in
verse three? Well, the foreigner was going to say, well, the Lord
will surely separate me from his people. You know, he’d be
a second class Israelite, something like that. But he says, let not
the eunuch say, behold, I’m a dry tree. As you all know, people
who probably learned about the birds and bees a long time ago,
if you’re a eunuch, you can’t have babies. And if you don’t
have babies, you can’t have offspring. And if you don’t have offspring,
your tree ends, right? Your family tree is dried up.
It bears no fruit. It is barren. It is impotent.
Your name and your prosperity are no more. When you go to your
grave, there goes your family, there goes your family tree.
And verse four says, thus says the Lord to the eunuchs who keep
my Sabbaths, to the eunuchs who choose the things that please
me, and to the eunuchs that hold fast my covenant, I will give
in my house and within my walls a monument and I’ll give a name. So what’s better than children?
I mean, children are pretty neat. They’re pretty expensive. Lose
a lot of sleep at night over them. But once they’re out of
the house and off on their own, they send money home. That’s
what I hear. My dad says it hasn’t happened
yet. And I guess Charlie and Judy, it hasn’t happened for
y’all yet either. Children are wonderful. But what
is God saying here for those who do not have them? I still
give you a monument. I still give you a name. It’s
better than sons and daughters. I give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off. Yes, grapes and grandkids, covenant
promise, covenant blessings are wonderful. And I know a lot is
made these days of children and offspring. And then of course
we go through stretches where not having children is probably
a thing of maybe today’s culture. But if you’re a believer, And
your name is written in heaven. If your name is written in the
Lamb’s book of life, you have an everlasting name that will
never be cut off. You’re in a family tree that
keeps on growing. You’re in a family tree that
lasts forever. And you shall not be cut off.
This little phrase, cut off, cut off, cut off. You’re a Wednesday
nighter and you’ve been in the Pentateuch with us. There’s certain
ways to be in the camp. And there’s certain ways, real
ways to get thrown out of the camp. Usually it means exile,
but a lot of times it means death. If you don’t keep God’s commandments,
you will be cut off. And so a foreigner comes knocking
on the gates of Jerusalem and says, please let me in. I love
Yahweh. Please let me in. I love worship. Please let me
in. I love the Sabbath. Please let me in. I delight in
the law. And they let you in. But then there’s this fear. Will
I be cut off? And what is God saying here? No. Everlasting
name, assurance, assurance of pardon, assurance of perseverance,
of grace and of faith. And so the ungodly, no, but the
godly, yes. And then in six and seven, it
speaks of more promises. The foreigners who join themselves
to the Lord. the foreigners who minister to
him, the foreigners who love the name of the Lord and his
servants, kind of has worship words. You know, um, what is
it? Psalm 100, come let us worship. Let us bow down. Uh, let us,
I got the wrong one here. I’m probably thinking of 95,
but you’ve got the, the worship word, serve the Lord with gladness. And so serving the Lord is very
often a worship word. And so foreigners, they, leave
out or leave behind their culture and their gods. They come identify
and join themselves with the Lord, their God fears. And they
want to minister to him or worship him. They want to serve him or
worship him. They want to love the name of
the Lord. And it says everyone who keeps the Sabbath, those
who don’t profane it, those who hold fast my covenant or who
are dedicated to me in heart and in commandments. These I
will bring to my holy mountain. Now, of course, here you got
to think, Holy mountain, holy mountain. A couple of weeks ago,
y’all heard our brother Will speak of the garden as temple. Then you got, you know, Mount
Sinai, the place where God dwelled. Then you’ve got Jerusalem, the
place where God dwelled with his people. And of course we
have the new Jerusalem, the holy city above. Wherever God is,
that’s his holy mountain. It’s Holy Mountain now, of course,
in heaven in the New Jerusalem. But when we come to him by faith,
we get brought into the reality, the heavenly reality of the family
of God. You catch glimpses of this in
Hebrews. where it speaks of worshipers.
You’ve not come to a mountain that shakes and quakes and burns
with fire. That’s Mount Sinai, but you’ve
come to the heavenly mountain. You’ve come to the heavenly city
of the new Jerusalem where God is. And Jesus is the spirit is
where the, the, the saints and the angels are surrounding the
throne of God, worshiping him night and day. All those who’ve
loved Jesus called on his name and died and gone to heaven are
there. And when we worship on earth and our little bitty fellowship
hall, We’re really in reality joining in with the worship that’s
already taken place in heaven. We just join in as well as with
all those on the face of the earth who call on the name of
the Lord. And so on earth, there are all
kinds of people in the visible church who call on the name of
the Lord and they meet in their little bitty places and their
big grand places and in between. but we ultimately join together
in the worship that is already in progress in the heavenly city. They bring their burnt offerings
and their sacrifices. They bring what is accepted on
his altar. His house of prayer is a house
of prayer for all peoples, all nations. Isn’t it wonderful to
live in this era where missions goes across the face of the earth
and calls men and women and boys and girls of all nations and
nationalities to Jesus Christ. And there’s a gospel promise
here in verse eight, the Lord God who gathers the outcast of
Israel. So he’s going to bring the exiles
back home. He also gathers others to him besides those already
gathered. We say this from time to time
around here, and I think it’s worth repeating. I think we only
have one person of Jewish descent in our Christian fellowship.
And so the rest of us are really blessed to be grafted in. The
rest of us are really blessed to be able to call on the name
of the Lord through faith in Jesus Christ. But what about
the characteristics of those who walk with the Lord, that
keep Sabbath, They keep commandments, heartfelt obedience, but they
follow the Lord closely. Do those things earn us salvation?
Of course not. But are they the fruit of a lively
and real faith? Yes. I think about this from
time to time because the demands of Jesus, not just to have faith
in him, but the demands of Jesus to be a disciple are no small
thing. And we live in a commitment phobia
world. And so, you know, you tell people,
you know, here’s our church, you know, the whole meat and
potatoes thing. We really want you to come on Sunday. We really
want you to be consistent You know, don’t go to the beach 9,000
times a year and think you’re gonna, you know thrive as a believer
We’ll miss you and you’ll miss Us, but also you’ll you’ll miss
the word There’s something about a quiet life and a life that
is well ordered towards worship Word and obedience and so maybe
These things will encourage us, but we can pray also for those
who would seek the Lord, that they might have hearts that desire
to order their lives after not culture and gods, but the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And perhaps that will see us
with a growth in our fellowship. Let’s do pray. Lord, we thank
you for a glimpse into salvation in Isaiah. Thank you for Grafting
us in we who are far off have been brought near we who were
not your people are now Called your people by the blood and
name of Jesus. We thank you for our present
and eternal position You will never cast us off and we give
you thanks in Christ’s name. Amen We want to sing of the Sabbath
Lord of